Bijlmer Car Park Floor Signage "CIVIC VIRTUE"

A floor piece was made in an abandoned parking garage with road surface marking and thrown stones made of aerated concrete. Like a game of hopscotch for the spiritual world, the piece leads one through several stadia, and provides places to jump over, places to avoid, places to rest, and places forever.

The markings seem to have been made without any interference of reason, and changes a statistical organization of subjects (i.e. people, cars), into a configuration through which the random, and with it, the divine, can seep back in.

In the design one can recognize many elements from children's games such as snakes-and-ladders, shooting marbles and hangman. Stones of aerated concrete, which have been broken from the parking garage's roof lay violently scattered about, as if giants had been playing there (the child extended into the future is not a grown-up, but a giant).

The lines and arrows in the design ignore the layout of the garage, and instead point inward, to the games own elements, and outward, beyond the direct environment of the garage, to the planets and the stars. As the orientation of the markings disregards and breaks free from the original parking space, so do the stones of concrete remove the game from current time, as their markings seem to have been formed very slowly, as if moved by glaciers or perhaps by the tilting of the earth itself. It is then that we can recognize these markings as evidence of acts that have happened beyond the present moment, and as such, they open up more distant perspectives to citizens that would otherwise view the laws around them simply as the current properties of their environment.

This reintroduction of the random into the purposeful space is the reintroduction of divine virtue into the contemporary statistical organization of ourselves as subjects. It is a game in which the movements and its outcome can never be fixed beforehand, if it is to remain virtuous. Any act on top of the map forms a new map, in the same way as an archeological excavation ignores the contemporary function of the site, while at the same time unveiling the sources that had lead to it.